Great opportunities to gain experience where you may not have had any, or the credentials on your resume to get you the opportunity in the first place.

Lots of room for growth within the company if you work at it. This isn't a place where you can come to work, do the minimum, and expect to get ahead. If you work hard you will. Pretty simple.

Lots of support from senior admins and managers available.

Cons

It's not going to be an easy ride. The first year is going to be tough for some people. Be prepared for some bumps along the way, especially if you are inexperienced. There are plenty of people to ask for help, but it can still be very stressful until you get the hang of things. Keep at it and get through this period, and you'll be fine.

Advice to Management

Keep hiring. Every employee who has been with the company for an extended period of time knows the opportunities that are available, they just may not be obvious to everyone.

WiredTree has been a great experience for me overall. Everyone here is very collaborative and very helpful if you need assistance. You're not expected to know everything, and you aren't given huge punishment for making an honest mistake - usually the managers will just send you an email describing what you did wrong, and how to do it right the next time.

Cons

The training could use some work. I had about 3 months of training but that "training" was mostly just working on worksheets on my own, and doing some simple tickets. There wasn't a whole lot of teaching or guidance overall. Most of what I learned, I learned on my own.

Advice to Management

Hire more people - we'll be needing them! Improve the training, and make sure people know how to avoid making simple mistakes. Big mistakes are understandable, but when people repeatedly do simple things wrong it can be frustrating, especially since different shifts don't always get opportunities to talk to each other, except through the shift coordinators.

You're exposed to a lot of technology, hardware including data center rackmount servers and networking equipment, the software used to run those systems, tools to mitigate problems and attacks, and can pick up a huge amount of experience in dealing with network security and data backup.

Cons

While they present themselves in appearances as a startup, they lack all of the flexibility and care of employees' well-being that a startup might otherwise have. Very strict and short lunch times, no flexibility with different working arrangements such as standing desks (this makes more sense when you might be working a 12 hour shift overnight), and the initial training leaves a lot to be desired. Communication is very poor, from management down to the support and development staff. Very little flexibility with working schedules.

Advice to Management

Solicit feedback from your workers and actually take actions in response to that feedback, rather than distracting by doing something else entirely. Forget the free energy drinks and allow people to adjust their ergonomics so they can work best for you.

Chances are you will assuredly learn things, both technical and not. You will get hands on with some current equipment and software, deal with reckless management, and learn to work under stress with difficult customers. These are things only experience can teach. They have fantastic chairs, which is good because you will be in them 12+ hours a day. Also, you will undoubtedly lose weight because you cannot eat during those 12 hours. Being thin is a plus.

Cons

WiredTree management is woefully apathetic. You can get nothing accomplished by attempting to work out any issues with them. Once you address issues they recognize you are a problem. This is especially troubling if there is a 'batch' of new hires recently; you can be assured one is going to be slotted for your spot. This is not an opinion. I have seen it happen dozens of times. Management tends to get their feeling hurt if you do not agree that you are happy. They take your issues personally and seek to end the relationship.The big thing that the management does care about is negative tweets. If you are the cause, look out! Staff is made to do impossible things in order to mitigate any troubling feedback.

Most reviewers have mentioned this and I reiterate because it is fact. There are no lunches and there are no breaks. If you get up to use the restroom, you are glared at. When you get hired, you are told you get 45 minutes over an 12 hour shift. This simply has never occurred. You instead can watch them eat breakfast, lunch, and potentially dinner. You are allowed to smell their food, but to never eat your own. Most folks will wait until the managers leave and smuggle food to their desks and hope 'HR' does not walk in.

There is a genuine rift between sections of staff. There is the group that was friends when the venture was launched, and there are the hires. You should be aware that you will be working in a hostile environment, moreso until you figure out who is on which side of the fence. You will not see this during the 'training period'. It will take a few months before the backbiting becomes obvious.

Taking your grievance up with HR will not only get you a blank look, but now management is aware you have a gripe. I already explained how this will end for you. Likely there are some regulations not being followed between an obvious conflict of interest and the lack of being allowed a lunch. We might need to follow that up with the proper channels.

The people you work with are great. In most cases they will extend help to you. Some weak ones manage to slip through the cracks. One in particular really stands out. She will duck and dodge any issues of relative difficulty. She targets tickets that are simple; password resets, firewall allows, etc. This allows her to have inflated counts of resolved issues, while you actually have to work to get resoolution with the issues you get stuck with. If a ticket goes sour she will duck out on it, and it becomes your issue. Managers are aware of this behavior and have never attempted to resolve it, regardless of the amount of complaints.

WiredTree hiring practices include hiring large amounts of workers at a time. This is because of how fast people quit; most wash out during 'training' or soon after. The ones that stay are used to replace the admins that they are getting ready to fire. We are always short staffed. We cannot hire people fast enough. I have seen the workers roll 3 times fully since I started here. It is the most acute employee atrition I have ever seen. Forget about taking sick time or vacation. This must be approved in order to be used. As we are always short staffed, you are always needed in that chair.

Shifts are 8AM-8PM and 8PM-8AM. You need to get out of the office quickly. At 8:01 you are on your time, you have to be back again before 8. Transportation, food, shower, sleep etc need to be budgeted into that 12 hours.

Wages are low, and bonuses are small and done via a lottery system. It is a good start in the industry and as soon as you quit you can expect your wages to double. The key to working here is to know the truth, and know that it is a very temporary job. Management will try to sell you the dream, but it is not to be had here. If you have the chance look into the eyes of both the management and the employees. You will see exhaustion and desperation. Nobody here is happy(from what I saw week after week). As long as you know what you are really get into, go for it! I did.

Advice to Management

Start the healing process by discontinuing your campaign of inaccurate replies to negative reviews. Saying that there has been a change, and that the reviewer worked there long ago is wrong. It is this inaccuracy that made me step forward and alert curious and cautious people to what is *currently* occurring. If you constantly run people into the ground, not allow them to eat a lunch, and make them to work in low temperatures, they will inevitably leave you.It makes sense to polish your staff into a well oiled machine, a unit capable of cooperation and leveraging talent, skill, and experience. However, talented personnel quit nearly as soon as start working, and the experienced get driven away. The reason medical insurance is free after 2 year is because no one stays that long. So, to remedy this, treat employees like they mean something to you. Attempt to be competitive with pay. Consider letting employees have a day off on Christmas. Stop yelling like its the Marine Corp and start hearing what we try to tell you. Happy workers make you more money because they want to see you succeed. Success is a 2 way street. Please do not reply to this review with verbal smoke and mirrors hoping to mitigate my statements in the eyes of readers.

I am sorry that you seem to be so upset with your time at WiredTree, but there are some gaps in your review. You state that you are a Current Employee - Senior Linux Systems Administrator and have been for over three years. That position was just created late in 2014, so you can't really be a current employee in that position. We haven't even filled that position yet.

Also, you state that people it takes two years for medical insurance to be free. If you were a current employee you would know that this policy changed back in 2014 and everyone gets 100% paid medical insurance after their 90 day training period. Lastly, this review is very similar to one that was posted on Aug 4, 2013 which talks a female coworker that "threw you under the bus" and you not being able to take a break.

While it is clear that your time with us ended on a bad note and you chose to create a second post about your time with us, the only thing we can do is tell you that we are very sorry that our business relationship ended so poorly on your end. We wish you the best in finding a career that makes you happy.

You will be surrounded by skilled admins and shift coordinators who are willing to extend their knowledge when asked; The experience you gain will be extremely useful to better your career as a systems admin; The range of tasks you take on don't stop at console work (ie, hardware and data center work will be a part of your day-to-day); Communication skills, critical thinking, and focus will be sharpened in order to complete your tasks as an admin here; Management is very experienced and professional, and are excellent trainers in acclimating someone to the work life of a web hosting admin; compensation is fair and is open for growth if you keep with it multiple years.

Cons

The shifts are long (12 hours) and the customers aren't always in a great mood or great communicators. Be prepared to take on a night shift if you are getting worked into the schedule (this could be a plus for some); The size of shift teams seem a bit light on shifts that get very busy; The vacation hour policy is stingy if you haven't worked there for multiple years; Some issues may be above your skill level and there may not be an immediate superior available to help sort the issue out quickly.

Advice to Management

Better cohesion or positive reinforcement to admins would be helpful and encouraging during long periods of time where communication between employee and manage does not exist or is difficult to have regularly (ie, night shifts). It may be beneficial to offer quarterly or half-year salary reviews to help keep employees dialed in to the company...which is also good for feedback on skills/admin status.

Thanks for your review of WiredTree and for your hard work while you were with us! We are glad that you found the on the job training and overall experience here to be a positive one. We are trying our best to give our coworkers a fun environment where they can hone their Linux skills and help our customers everyday.

In response to your advice to management, one thing that we have recently changed this year was providing more frequent staff reviews. We have moved from a yearly review cycle to one every six months, so we can set goals, gather more relevant feedback, and review salary. We realized that a year is too long of a review cycle to be effective and we are sorry that you didn't get to experience the new one.. We have also revamped our entire review process so it can be better used to track goals and feedback over time. We feel that these changes are a step in the right direction to keep our coworkers engaged with the company during their time at WiredTree.

I will pass your feedback about the 12hr shift and vacation time in our next operations meeting. Thanks for sharing it. We have been looking at other shift models to see if our support team wants to move away from the 12hr shift. Most are very happy with the bulk time off that the shift provides and most have been resistant to moving to a different shift model as they would lose their 3/4 days off a week. Regardless, we understand that the 12hr shift is not for everyone and we are taking steps to explore all other shift options.

As for not having an immediate superior available, we have redone our management structure this year, so we have a direct supervisor on every shift throughout the week, along with a manager on every shift Monday through Friday. We also recently promoted one of our most senior Linux Administrators to General Manager of Support to help facilitate a better internal support structure for your past position.

As you can see we have been making a lot of positive changes since your time here at WiredTree. We truly want to make WiredTree the best it can be and we are very grateful for your feedback. We wish you the best of luck!... MoreLess

Up to date technology and you get to take your laptop home with you. There's a bar literally downstairs and across the street. Good places to eat. Train drops you off a block away. Chairs are comfortable.

Cons

Management yells at you, talks behind your back, and prevents you from eating lunch. HR is the owners wife which if you ask me is completely unprofessional and a conflict of interest. HR also doesn't seem to have a clue on how to answer any questions you may have. Management even talks behind managements back A LOT. The infrastructure there is terrible. Cable management in non-existant. 12 hour shifts are very trying especially when you don't get a real lunch break. The turn around rate is about a year. They either fire you after that time or you will quit. There are employees there merely to snitch on others. The promises they make when you are first hired become mere dreams. Senior Admins have a god complex and almost laugh at you when you have a question. Training is terrible. Training was a workbook while the trainer surfed the internet not even helping with the queue. Floor manager is a nice guy but he is probably the one you want to watch what you say to the most. Many false misleading things have come from him too often. It seems like management is overworked just like everyone else. Pay isn't great and receiving a raise is almost impossible. Even if you are approved for a raise, they make sure to wait 3-6 months before actually giving you a raise. Employees have been fired unjustly with no warning or reason. You cannot eat at your desk so you starve until management leaves even though Management and other senior eat at their desks. Prepare for coats and gloves all year around. Even when people complain about numbness in their hands from the cold it is disregarded without even a simple compromise. If you increase the heat when management leaves they yell at everyone for electricity cost when all the employees are trying to do is stay a little warm because the temperature is set to 60 degrees.

Advice to Management

Listen to your admins, stop yelling at them, actually give people raises and make room for shift changes and employee needs. LET YOUR ADMINS EAT!! depriving employees from lunch breaks regardless of if they're salaried is LAW not an option to contemplate about.

I am sorry you felt tricked. That is the last thing we want people to feel. It sounds like you were with us a while back based on your pros listed and we have changed and improved a lot of things since you worked with us over three years ago.

To clear some things up in your post, we never prevented anyone from taking a lunch. We actually have a no eating at your desk policy to force people to take a break away from their desk and when working a 12hr shift. We also give everyone that works at WiredTree paid breaks, so you relax for a bit and recharge while you are on shift. That is why we provide unlimited filtered water, coffee, tea and soda and we also provide fresh fruit and snacks you can enjoy while on your breaks too. All managers on duty are instructed to ensure that people take breaks as well. It is an internal company policy that we have had for many years now. I am sorry you felt you couldn't take one. No one in management tells any of their coworkers they cannot take lunch. It simply doesn't happen.

In in our offices, the heat and AC is set to comfortable levels and any manager is OK to adjust it for their coworkers. It's always been that case. I am sorry that it wasn't set your exact liking and you felt that it was too cold.

It sounds like you are very upset with your time here at WiredTree and that you had conflicts working with your coworkers. We encourage all of our coworkers to talk to management if they are seeing someone else on their shift behaving inappropriately or are not working as part of the team. We do that to encourage a positive and healthy working environment for everyone here at WiredTree. I am sorry you don't like the fact that people would speak up to their peers and managers when this kind of behavior was impacting them in a negative way.

We are sorry that you are so upset 3+ years after working with us. We wish you the best of luck with finding a job and work environment that makes you happy. Warm regards!... MoreLess